Shopify Dropshipping Guide - Build a Winning Shopify Product Page

So you want to be a dropshipper huh? Looking for the Shopify dropshipping guide to build your own business?

You’ve come to the right place. Be warned though, this will be a longer than usual read due to the comprehensive nature of the tutorial. If you’ve been thinking about doing eCommerce for a while, you've probably looked into Shopify and toyed with the idea of selling stuff online.

Shopify is an amazing platform. It simplifies the entire process of running an online store, yet it can still seem daunting to some.

For this reason, there are a ton of “Shopify experts” out there charging anywhere from $500 to $1500 for basic courses on setting up a Shopify store.

We’re all tired of these so-called “gurus” profiting from information that should be free.

The fact is, anyone can start a successful dropshipping business from scratch.

In this article, I’ll show you how to find a winning product and build out a sleek Shopify product page that encourages visitors to take action on your site.

Feel free to follow along step by step.

Contents:

• What is dropshipping?
• Does dropshipping work?
• Picking a winning product
• Importing products to your Shopify store
• Building a winning Shopify product page
• Making it mobile with PageFly
• Final tips for success

What is dropshipping?

First. Let’s start by stating what dropshipping is not. Dropshipping is not a get rich quick scheme. And it is certainly not a walk in the park.

Dropshipping is simply a business model like any other. But what makes this model so popular?

• No overhead (or very little) costs when starting up
• All orders shipped and fulfilled by supplier direct to the customer on your behalf
• Minimized risk
• More time to focus on marketing and brand building

Does dropshipping work?

A lot of Negative Nancy’s out there will tell you that dropshipping is dying, or the marketplace is oversaturated. Don’t listen to them. These people either:

1. Don’t understand it
2. Didn’t put in the work necessary to succeed
3. Have a negative mindset in general

Dropshipping is a business model just like any other. If you pick the right niche, put in enough hours, and constantly analyze your market you can earn a great living online.

Disclaimer: I’m not promising you’ll have a Lamborghini in 6 months. I’m going to show you how to build a professional looking Shopify product page to dropship items and supplement your current income.

Read more: How To Do Alibaba Dropshipping The Right Way

Picking a winning product

Choosing your niche

One of the biggest issues is having no idea what to sell.

That’s perfectly fine. When starting out, it’s difficult to know what people want. You might be tempted to create a general goods website (not recommended) like a lot of folk do. These can end up being untidy, unfocused and unprofessional looking.

Pick a niche instead.  

What people need and what people want are two entirely different things. People spend more money on the latter. When we “want”, we usually have a “passion” for it. Here are a few examples of niches people are passionate about.

• Pets
• Gaming
• Fishing
• Survival
• Golf
• Fitness
• Photography
• Fashion
• Beauty
• Jewelry
• Cooking

People love golf, especially wealthy retirees with money to spend. A $3000 Nikon is nothing to someone who loves to take photos for fun. And of course, we’re so attached to our pets that we can’t bear to be apart from them.

When picking a passionate niche, the more specific the better. Success in dropshipping requires a winning product. By combining two of the above niches, you can narrow your scope to a specific audience and increase our chances of success.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going with Fashion x Fitness. The product - leggings.

Check out our Niche-Finding Workbook:

• Best Dropshipping Niches and Products To Sell - Updated Version.
• Best Tools for Finding A Winning Dropshipping Products
• The Ultimate Guide To Reverse Dropshipping In 2022

Finding the right supplier

Not all sellers on Aliexpress are the same. Pay careful attention to who you’ll be dropshipping from. At the end of the day, if the products are low quality and vendors don’t ship on time, your customers will suffer. As well as your brand.

If you hover your mouse over each item you’ll see ratings and a badge below. The badge indicates they are a top seller. I only ever go with top sellers. You should too.

These leggings right here have great reviews, top seller badge and over 3000 orders. It looks good to me so we’ll come back and import this item later.

Now let’s get started with Shopify.

Note: You don’t have to be in love with this niche at first. However, you’ll quickly find your “passion” for it when it starts generating you income.

Importing dropshipping products to your Shopify store

Head over to Shopify and create your account for free. You’ll get a 14 day trial period and all you need is an email to join. 2 weeks is more than enough time to get everything set up and make your first sale.

When you’re set up with your store name (you can change it later), find the ‘Apps’ panel from the dashboard then visit the Shopify App Store. Search for ‘Oberlo’ and install it to your store.

Announcement: On June 15, 2022, the Oberlo app was retired and handed over to DSers. Previously Oberlo users will not be able to access the app after this date, and the app will be removed from their Shopify store.

Next, install the Oberlo Chrome Extension onto your browser.

This is how you import your products from Aliexpress with one click. I like to select and import my products first. This way you can get a clear vision of your target audience and design your site accordingly.

Back to Aliexpress we go.

The product we looked at earlier has lots of variations that visitors on your site will be able to choose from. Pay close attention to the shipping options. Making customers wait too long for items to arrive is usually a deal breaker.

When it comes to shipping, ePacket is the easiest option for you and your customers. It’s cheap and usually has a shorter delivery time than Aliexpress standard shipping.

Now that we’ve selected the best shipping option, use the Oberlo chrome addon to import it directly to your Shopify store with the ‘label’ icon in the bottom right corner. Voila!

Head back to Shopify and open the Oberlo app.

Imported products from Aliexpress can be found on the left menu. Don’t worry about editing the product in Oberlo. Just hit “Import to store”.

Now we can finally see the product linked to Shopify under the ‘products’ tab.

Aliexpress automatically imports the product descriptions from their site, which are generally quite horrible to look at. Write your own product description and keep only a few specifications from Aliexpress. Additionally, I added an image with some guarantees and payment badges directly above the product copy to increase trust.

Don’t forget to use enticing language and incentives that make people want to buy.

Now we’re getting to the most important part. Creating the Shopify product page!

Building a winning Shopify product page

When it comes to conversions and capturing that important sale, it all comes down to the product page. Sure, customers want to know about your values, guarantees and brand story. But ultimately, the page that closes the deal is the one with the actual product on it. It’s extremely important to remember this when building out your store, so let me spell it out for you once more.

“The product page is the most important page on your site”

Sadly however, Shopify doesn’t leave much room for customization of the most vital page of your store. Sure you can edit the font and add your own logo, but beyond this, there’s not a lot of opportunities to convince your store visitors to actually make the purchase.

You always have the option to edit the code of your template from the Shopify dashboard, but from personal experience, this can also potentially make things worse.

The last thing you want is for elements to disappear completely, ruining the functionality of your store.

Considering most of us aren’t fluent in HTML, CSS, Javascript or Liquid (Shopify’s native language), I always recommend using a Shopify page builder app. Most of them use a simple drag and drop system, letting you create custom pages with zero coding know-how.

Creating a sales product page with PageFly

PageFly is a Shopify page builder that allows you to create fully customizable web pages. It has a metric ton of features and elements all designed to increase your store's conversion rate.

There was a time when PageFly only let you add content to the top and bottom of your existing Shopify theme’s product page. Now thanks to recent updates, you can use PageFly to replace it entirely and build out a product page with all the right elements to convert leads into sales.

You can grab PageFly to follow along with the tutorial. There’s no credit card required and no hidden fees.

TRY PAGEFLY FREE - OPEN SHOPIFY STORE

Planning your page layout

It helps to have an idea of the layout for your product page before hand to make the building process smoother with PageFly. I’ve decided on the following layout starting from the top:

1. Banner
2. Logo
3. Product
4. Reviews
5. Brand promise
6. Additional Info (Shipping, Returns, Support)
7. Call to Action

Creating a new Product Page with PageFly

First things first. Open up the PageFly dashboard in the apps section of your Shopify. By creating a new Product Page with PageFly we can use our already imported items from Oberlo/AliExpress.

I’m using the existing Shopify theme product page layout for functionality purposes.

I advise hiding the Shopify header and footer. This way we can add in our own content above and below the product.

Using PageFly elements to build the page layout

I’ve dragged the PageFly elements from the left hand side straight onto the page. For sections 1 and 7, I used the Full Section Element. For sections 2, 5 and 6 I used a 3 Block Layout (⅓ ⅓ ⅓). This is important for the logo and other content I’ll be adding later to make sure it’s optimized for mobile view.

Let’s start adding the content to each section one by one.

Banner & Logo (Sections 1 & 2)

I’ve dragged a Paragraph element into section 1 and dragged an Image element into the middle column of section 2. To change the background colors, fonts, and add the logo, refer to the right hand menu under Styling.

Here’s the result of a little bit of tweaking each section in the Styling tab. If you need more in depth info on how to effectively manipulate section sizes, margin, padding or anything else, refer to PageFly help.

I quickly thought of a brand name for yoga leggings and made a free logo with Canva.

Pro Tip: Always view your live page to see how it will actually look in a web browser. To do this, hit Save and Publish then View Live Page as seen below.

The results so far can be seen below. The announcement banner contrasts nicely with the white and matches the brand colours. The product we selected is automatically added with your Shopify theme design.

I usually prefer to use my existing theme’s product page because the variant options and sizes are clearly laid out for the customer. However, I usually always hide the Shopify header and footer and add my own content above and below the product.

Tip: Edit the variant names in the Products section of the Shopify Dashboard. Be creative. “Beyond Black” sounds a lot more enticing than plain old Black.

Let’s move on to sections 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Adding Reviews from AliExpress (Section 4)

For section 4 (reviews), PageFly has partnered with Loox reviews app. This lets you import reviews from real customer straight from AliExpress. Thanks to this partnership you can now drag the Reviews Widget straight onto the page.

Tip: You will need to install Loox to showcase these on your product page. When you’ve imported your reviews, they will automatically display where you placed your widget.

They offer a 2 week trial period but if you’re a Shopify developer you can enjoy this app for free. It’s definitely the best reviews app on the market. When you’ve imported your reviews, they will automatically display where you placed your widget.

Pro Tip: I highly recommend thoroughly checking the reviews and remove any that seem fake, spammy or not in line with your brand. You’ll have the chance to do this with the app before you push the reviews to your store

Brand Promise (Section 5)

I created section 6 (Brand Promise) by dragging icon images, heading elements and paragraph elements into each column. To make sure they’re evenly aligned, use the 3 block layout (⅓ ⅓ ⅓) I showed you earlier. Adjust the font, size, positioning, background colors and more under the Styling menu on the right hand side.

Add in your own unique content about your brand and what makes you special. Vital for trust.

Hit Save & Publish then view Live Page to check out the results.

Additional Info (Section 6)

It’s always helpful to have sections that customers can refer to if they have any concerns or questions. The safer you can make the reader feel, the more likely they are to buy your stuff. Let them know you’re in safe hands.

I’m going to add in a simple additional info section by dragging 3 separate text headings into each column - REFUNDS & RETURNS, SHIPPING, CONTACT.

Now would be a good time to use PageFly’s Accordion element.

By dragging it onto the page, we create an accordion that expands to show more text without ever having to leave the page.

Tip: To change the headings for this element, make sure you follow the breadcrumb navigation and select Accordion at the bottom of the page. This can be a bit tricky to find as it doesn’t initially show up under Styling.

Viewing the live page, this is a much better option to increase your chances of capturing the sale. At the end of the day, it’s your choice which route to take.  

Let’s add the final section of our page - a solid call to action to seal the deal.

Call to Action (Section 7)

Every good sales page needs a smashing CTA (Call to Action) to take control and make the purchasing process as smooth as possible. The idea is to take the reader by the hand and lead them further down the sales funnel.

My last CTA is going to be the Featured Product Element.  

This is a great opportunity to give the final push needed to make the sale.

Last but not least, we want to change the CTA button to say “BUY NOW” and alter the settings so it sends them directly to the checkout. By default this button will add the product to the cart.

In this case, I want them to continue down the sales funnel, so redirecting straight to checkout helps reduce the risk cart abandonment.

Voila.

This product page could, of course, be designed better, but considering it took me only 30 minutes to throw it together, I call this a win.

This Shopify product page ticks a lot of boxes necessary for creating conversions:

• Free shipping announcement
• Custom logo
• Unique product description
• Positive reviews from real people
• Brand promise and guarantee
• Multiple CTA’s
• Secure payment badges

Don’t forget to take your time and craft the best possible page you can with all the right elements. You might want to add a product video, sizing guide or any other custom content that’s relevant to your brand.

Now for our final task - making it as smooth as possible for mobile users.

Making it mobile with PageFly

If you haven’t heard, over 50% of all internet traffic worldwide goes through mobile devices. By optimizing your pages to be mobile responsive, you’ll reach people at a quicker rate, increase customer satisfaction, and keep your site relevant.

If people have to scroll left and right to read your site's content, they’re highly unlikely to trust your brand enough to purchase.

PageFly takes care of this issue for you by making your pages mobile friendly by default. You will, however, need to make a few tweaks to the mobile layout to get the most out of it.

One look in Mobile View (find it on the top toolbar) and I can instantly see that my site will look 100 times better by removing the empty columns above and below the logo.

Pro tip: Deleting these columns will displace your logo and ruin the structure of your site in Desktop view. Instead, hiding them on mobile view will remove them without affection the desktop version of your site.

The text is also overwhelming. By using the Styling tab I can play with the font formatting to make it easier on the eyes.

Note: Any Styling changes made to elements in Mobile view won’t affect desktop, laptop or tablet views. This way you can create the perfect mobile experience.

A few small styling tweaks can make a huge difference to your customer's experience on mobile. Again, do what works best for you and your brand. With PageFly you have complete control.

Check out our other resources on Dropshipping with Shopify: 

• Dropshipping 101: 10+ Dropshipping Stores To Inspire You 
• How To Build A Dropshipping Store On Shopify

Final tips for success

• Use secure payment badges to boost trust on your product page
• Use high quality images compressed with tinypng for quick load times (essential for SEO)
• Use SEO Image Optimizer to get more organic search traffic
• If possible, use product videos for credibility and user attention
• Check your page for broken links before going live
• Prioritize user experience on mobile first
• Setup Google Analytics to track conversions and direct your focus to the right places

Hopefully you’re as excited as I am to find your winning product, build a professional store and sell like hell.